Life & Wisdom Quote by Cleobulus

“Learn to bear bravely changes of fortune” is advice with sand under its nails: practical, weathered, and suspicious of anyone who thinks life can be engineered into stability. Cleobulus writes from an archaic Greek world where “fortune” wasn’t a motivational metaphor but a civic and cosmic reality. Cities rose and fell on harvests, war, patronage, and plague; individuals were only as secure as their kinship ties and the next turn of the political wheel. In that context, the line isn’t a soft call for positivity. It’s training for volatility.

The verb “learn” matters. Bravery here isn’t a personality trait you’re born with; it’s a discipline. That framing subtly rejects both fatalism (you can do nothing) and arrogance (you control everything). The subtext is an ethic of self-governance: you may not command events, but you can command your response, and that’s the only sovereignty that lasts.

“Bear” is equally revealing. Cleobulus isn’t selling escape, transcendence, or revenge against fate. He’s describing a load you will carry. Bravery becomes less about heroic spectacle and more about endurance without collapse into bitterness, panic, or vanity. The phrase “changes of fortune” also implies a cycle: today’s loss is not permanent, today’s win is not a crown. That cuts both ways, a warning to the triumphant and a lifeline to the ruined.

As a poet, Cleobulus compresses a whole political psychology into one sentence: resilience as public virtue, emotional restraint as survival strategy, and humility as the price of living under a capricious sky.